a livingstonemusic.net/article

A week in Fermanagh...

Seven days I spent in a cottage in County Fermanagh with my family.... to what end?

I confronted the idea that "there is no such thing as truth in the perceptible universe; every idea when analysed is found to contain a contradiction. It is quite useless (except as a temporary expedient) to set up one class of ideas against another as being "more real". The advance of man towards God is not necessarily an advance towards truth. All philosophical systems have crumbled. But each class of ideas possesses true relations within itself."
(Aleister Crowley: "Magick in Theory and Practice")

I confronted the idea that notions of hopelessness and despair can be eradicated and replaced with an understanding of the situation. Out of pain should come great learning, making the experience a necessary process. A real, raging row with my thirteen year old Son brought great hurt to both of us, but with it, has come an even closer relationship between each other.

I confronted the idea that without the Sun we would cease, but only in this current state of being. Nothing dies. We become something else. And without our inner 'Spiritual Sun' we would cease learning and growing in wisdom.

I confronted the idea of being inside a mother's womb during a visit into the Marble Arch Caves at Florencecourt near Enniskillen.
The caves are a deep, underground, natural underworld of rivers, waterfalls, passages and chambers, giving the term 'Middle Earth' a meaning to me.
Before the Marble Arch Caves were explored, local people believed there were demons living within them. They were a source of great fear, until their mysteries were uncovered by two French explorers. It's amazing how anything we do not know about or understand, is automatically assumed to have some kind of 'evil' as being responsible for it.
How I would love to spend a few hours inside those cave alone...

I confronted the idea of the old ways making way for current perceptions of the universe around and within me at Caldragh Cemetery,a small graveyard on Boa Island, which contains two 'Janus' figures (one pictured above). They are gravestones carved in rock and from what I've been told, date to pre-Christianity in Ireland.
The feeling from walking around the small graveyard was the very same feeling I experienced when I visited the school house at Anwoth in Scotland, the scene of the birth/death/rebirth maypole dance in the film 'The Wicker Man'.
Being close to such old artifacts always reminds me of how short my own time in this incarnation is...

I confronted the idea that the magic of life happens on the astral level (or on the inside), and a manifestation of that happens on the outside. The idea that "life is but a dream" is registering as a feasible concept.
I sat by a tall, Fermanagh tree, the Green Man, the spirit of vegetation appeared so father-like. What a comfort that was to me. Andy Partridge's 'Green Man' echoed around... "Please do bend down for the one called the Green Man. Forever to Him, you are tied..."

I confronted the idea that although my family is special to me, at the source of all things, everything is family, nothing excluded. It's the same source manifested in a myriad of ways. After seven days of hard brainstorming, I can say that my relationship with Nature was enriched to great ends. The Fermanagh soil holds great knowledge which came to me with clarity, and there is indeed, no part of me, or you that is not of the Gods...

Now the REAL work begins - the application of what I've allegedly learnt during my seven days spent in a cottage in Fermanagh with my family, into everyday life...

a livingstonemusic.net/article - 2004